1. Technical Field
The invention relates to marketing. More particularly, the invention relates to a development methodology for a multi-channel marketing database.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Direct marketing provides targeted marketing messages that are designed to compel individual consumers to purchase specific products or services. Direct marketing has been around for years. Increasingly, organizations are using multiple marketing channels, including outbound channels such as direct mail, telemarketing, e-mail, and direct response television, to deliver these messages to their customers. Organizations are also exploiting inbound channels, such the Web, customer call centers, and point of sale facilities. Such multi-channel integration provides the potential for retailers to deliver consistent messaging across all of their customer touchpoints, both inbound and outbound. This proliferation of message delivery mechanisms, coupled with the rapid development of new tools and techniques designed to increase the level of sophistication and accuracy allowed within a given marketing campaign, e.g. reporting, analysis, predictive modeling, campaign management, and optimization tools, has made the coordination of marketing messages within and across marketing campaigns more challenging to manage, more complicated to produce, and more critical to the success of any enterprise.
The increase in the number of marketing campaigns, the improving ability the market has to capture and retain detailed information on customer transactions, and the fact that all of this data is being managed and used by more and more people, as dictated by the limits of time and organization, create a greater need for integrated tools and systems to manage the data generated and repeatedly used by these individuals.
Prior solutions enabled marketers to target messages and offers to individual customers, but lacked the consistent ability to capture and integrate customer information and transaction data from across the enterprise. For example, a retailer may capture detailed transaction information at its physical store locations through its point-of-sale (POS) technology, but is unable to integrate that data with purchase history from its on-line store, even though the data were generated through sales to the exact same individual customer.
Additionally, users from different locations or working in different departments/divisions of a single enterprise seldom have access to the same customer data because this is captured and housed in legacy systems designed for specific tasks that are unique to an individual department or functional area. Information regarding any given customer, therefore, may be housed in many different computer systems, thus providing no single user with a complete understanding of the depth or breadth of a given customer relationship.
There are many publications, books, and periodicals which concern the subjects of database marketing, direct marketing, customer relationship management, one-to-one marketing, and relational database systems for account and customer management.
A sampling of these publications includes:                Customers.com—Patricia B. Seybold (a 1998 book about profitable business strategies for the Internet economy);        Stores—A National Retail Federation monthly publication, dealing with the challenges of technology and the Internet in retail store operations; and        Internet Retailer—A Faulkner and Gray monthly publication dealing with merchandising and advertising challenges for Internet and multi-channel retailers.        
However, there has been heretofore no solution available for enabling multi-channel marketers to analyze, create, track, control, coordinate, and execute marketing strategies across multiple customer touchpoints using various communications media and methods.
Key to developing such strategies is a methodology for implementing a system that achieves consistent results. In the past, custom database solutions were created for a client based upon the client's specified needs. With the development of a standard solution having a consistent hardware/software configuration and a standard data model for each market, it is necessary to create a development methodology that contains classic components, such as analysis, design, and implementation, yet that could be customized specific to a multi-channel marketing database.
The Company is organized around teams. Although this organizational structure works well for servicing clients, it often hinders sharing of the best practices across teams.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a development methodology for a multi-channel marketing database. It would be further advantageous to provide a methodology that ensures consistent results and client deliverables when implementing a multi-channel marketing database. A development methodology also provides a guide for new employees to the company or existing employees who are involved in the development of a multi-channel marketing solution for the first time.